It seems a common feature of the increasing number of stories and scandals involving anabolic steroids in racing that we are asked to believe some fairly extraordinary things.

That Mahmood al-Zarooni acted alone, for instance. That experienced vets using a new product called Sungate in a racing yard did not read the label first. Or, more recently, that the Irish Turf Club remained blissfully unaware for a little more than two years that investigators from Ireland's Ministry of Agriculture believed they had found powerful anabolic agents during a raid on a leading stable in January 2012.

Since the same ministry channels about €45m of government funding into the Irish racing industry each year and there must therefore be no end of contact, both formal and informal, between the two the last of these seems the most surprising of all. Yet it might be worth giving the Turf Club the benefit of the doubt, if only because its initial reaction to the news that Philip Fenton, a trainer with three big chances at Cheltenham, was about to appear in court charged with illegal possession of veterinary products including anabolic steroids was consistent with complete shock. He has not yet entered a plea.

Ireland's regulator eventually sprang into action on Friday, publishing details of a strict and extensive new drug-testing and anti-doping regime which will come into force from 1 January 2015. It is designed to allow the authorities to find and test any thoroughbred in the country, whether it is "in" or "out" of training, and, if it can be implemented as planned, it should be as comprehensive as any anti-doping programme in the world.

Two days earlier a testing team from the British Horseracing Authority was at Fenton's yard in County Tipperary to interview the trainer and take samples from his intended runners at the Cheltenham Festival, including Last Instalment, the third-favourite for the Gold Cup. A brave face was put on it but it can only have added to the embarrassment of Irish racing's regulator that a foreign authority was on its turfand presumably asking Fenton the questions which, with better communication with the ministry, the Turf Club's officials should have been posing fully 25 months beforehand.

The BHA is expected to reveal some time in the next couple of days what action, if any, it will take in respect of Fenton's Festival runners following last week's visit. Regardless of the potential fallout if one of the trainer's horses — Last Instalment above all — were to win at Cheltenham, meanwhile, the Irish have raised the ante in terms of the Authority's own future policy on doping, and in particular doping with steroids, which can exert a performance-enhancing effect long after a horse has stopped testing positive.

Early April — though hopefully not the day before the Grand National — is the latest estimate of when the BHA will publish its latest anti-doping proposals. Both Ireland and Australia have now produced schemes which aim to track — and potentially test — horses from the first few months of their lives. The BHA must now follow suit, even though Britain's racing industry is much larger than Ireland's and, for practical purposes, much more widespread than that in Australia, where the main racing operations are clustered round the biggest tracks.

According to one of the many websites selling Nitrotain, which was used by Zarooni and allegedly found at Fenton's stable, it is "a potent, short-acting oral anabolic steroid with very low potential for adverse side-effects and a short withdrawal time". The effectiveness of any new regime in coping with such a powerful but difficult-to-detect drug will be determined not so much by the penalty for being caught as the likelihood. It will not be easy, and it will certainly not be cheap, as there will need to be a step-change in the number of tests carried out. Quite simply, though, nothing less will do.